a coin toss

(Scene opens on girl, sitting on toilet seat, holding pregnancy test with trembly hands. There is a banging on the bathroom door.)
GIRL (directed towards door): All right, okay? Don't break the door down. I just need some fucking privacy or something.
(Takes out cigarette, puts it in her mouth.)
Oh, shit. I'm not supposed to have this. (Takes cigarette, and crushing it beneath her toe on the ground, smiles grimly) Doctor's orders, I guess.
You know, me and Brian. We're not perfect, not on the best day. But earlier, everything was really fucking pretty, stumbling into the gas station and stifling laughter against our palms. Brian kept telling me to be quiet, but I'd just laugh harder, and he'd put his hand over my mouth. I'd lick it, but he wouldn't take it off. It tasted like sweat.
So we got into the gas station. We pulled pretzels of off those little hooks and stuffed them into our coat pockets, the cashier so apathetic that he just watched us take shit with a deadpan face. I got kind of freaked out, with him sitting there staring at us like a jury handing down a guilty verdict. But then Brian leaned over to me and whispered, "Extra pretzels, lady, you're eating for two now." It wasn't really funny, but I laughed so hard I fell down in the aisle right on my butt, right on a packet of pretzels. The bag popped and pretzels were everywhere and so were my legs. And the clerk just sat there and watched us, said nothing about anything. Not even when I bought a pack of cigarettes and a pregnancy test at the same time.
Maybe he knew something, like how close we both were to crying, and how really we were just laughing because neither of us knew what people are supposed to do when they find out they made something permanent like a baby together.
And then after that, we got in the car to drive back to the motel. We were still laughing, by then so hard that we were crying, and Brian with his fresh-out-of-high-school quarterback arms, quarterback ass and smile, he says:
"I'm not gonna be like my dad, right? I'll be a better dad than my dad was, right?" and neither of us are smiling anymore, so I just say, "Yeah." It got quiet in the car, really quiet. And I needed to hold on to something to make sure I could keep things together, that I wouldn't fall apart. I grabbed his hand over the seat of the car and hold it there, trying to make us a one-person instead of two people.
We passed some neighborhoods that looked like shanty towns, all put together in one night. And there was rust everywhere, little pieces of plastic in the backyards, toys that had been left out in the rain. When we passed by people's windows sometimes you could see the shadows of an argument through the blinds.
I held Brian's hand tighter.
"What do you think our chances are? Like, really?"
There was a silence and he kept his eyes on the road.
"Fifty-fifty," he said.
(There is a knock on the door, startling her out of her reverie)
GIRL: Jesus Christ, Brian, I'm going!
You know, my whole life I've been failing tests. Maybe this one will be different.

through motel curtains

my favorite daydream is a motel room--
our clothes like a second carpet
over the ugly brown wall-to-wall stuff.
you rest your head on my stomach
and we fall asleep
in the alien light
of the television.
-----------------------------
in the afternoons
we watch clouds hang lower
over backyards,
broken tricycles
and rusted basketball hoops.
on the windows the rain
turns everything to blurry suggestions.
-----------------------------
you gave me a shell and said,
"This is a promise that I'll
take you to the beach someday."
I put it in my shoebox
next to seventeen dollars
and my social security card
and tried to be realistic about it.

portrait of a lady

when I am old, I hope
I'm the most wizened
androgynous crone
on the block

shoveling my own snow
off my driveway
writing in pen with
arthritic fingers
speaking
in a loud ugly voice,
sometimes singing off-key

I will perfect my librarian glare
and never ever wear a stupid
eyeglass chain

so nobody will dare to talk about
me in the third person in front of me
or compare me with my
younger self

and I will be crowned Wisest Old Lady
in the Universe

it doesn't matter that I can't dance;
there's no talent portion for
that kind of thing

a year in review

keep holding my face in your hands
like it was something
expensive

brought to you by the prefix a-

a sick fluttering of my
pulse
like
the beating of a moth
missing a wing

all day I have been throwing
myself against windows
searching for
thinking about
away,
away,
away

out.

you politicians
with your lipless mouths,
fat
lovingly folded
like laundry
around
your chinless chins

the things you will do in God's name--
sacrifice firefighters as burnt lambs
then
go to church

sit heavily in the pews
on your
milk-fed organic
rump roasts

feel righteous

tell the public you
cannot do your
job-
it's Christmas

whenever I open a newspaper
I become Lee Harvey Oswald

paraplegics have more nerve than you,
you and your spineless
spines

scrambled eggs

the last time I saw her before she died,
my grandma dropped an egg on the floor
she told me to hold the frying pan
just like
that,
wrist loose and a nice grip
like I would a tennis racket

I've always been terrible at sports

I kept my wrists rigid like
branches
she dropped the egg on
the floor
and there was something
pretty
about the way it crumbled
into itself

like ashes
from a crematorium

every time
I see an egg I imagine
my grandmother inside
red lipstick
reborn from
the fireplace

people are always telling me you're toxic

you are a little puppeteer
everything in the room
connected to your hands
by invisible lines

bring the beer in your
hand to your lips,
and
someone jerks their head
drawn to you like curtains

shift your weight
and the weight of the world
rests with you
the gravity of being the center
of the universe heavily sits
on your right hip

your eyelids must be so heavy
some mornings
how do you lift them?
how do you get out of bed with
so many strings attached?

above your bedroom door
all those lines knit themselves
into a Charlotte-worthy spiderweb

it says
SOME PIG

it's like I'm Betamax and you're VCR
and somehow
you have pushed me
out of the infinite loop.

damn,
wish I could upgrade
to DVD or something.

because I am constantly vying for the computer

in my house, I will only be writing my poem a day on the blog at novicember.
Sorry for being lazy, sort of.

a rounded edge

Western civilization is all about squares

square house,
square rooms,
square painting
behind which is a safe with
a round lock
where I keep my fears

all these squares--
I forget sometimes
the world is circular

ode to processed food

radiation is cool
--buffalo wings, five minutes
I like microwaves

teeth on the edge of my lip
like small white almonds

eat me

ghost sheets

half-moons
in their nail beds
remind me

my period is coming

stains
so womanly
like nail polish
painted on my sheets

college essay

The Compensation Vectors of Fish Swimming Against a Sideways Current

Anorexia is a brittle word, often mistaken for a brittle disease. It is not. Rather, it is an invisible current, an undertow that pulled my junior year beneath water as I watched one of my best friends drown.
“This kind of sadness is normal for children your age,” my mother advised.
“Hormones,” my brother suggested.
“Female… problems?” my father tentatively put forward.
Isolation claimed me. I found myself torn between my health and that of my friend's. Her parents went so far as to pretend I invented her problems when I came to them for help.
“Your whole family is on anti-depressants,” her stepmother said vindictively. “You don’t know anything.” Meanwhile, I would sit with her at lunch, frozen with a horrible
fascination, watching her pinch what was left of her thigh obsessively. The worst came in October, when she was 95 pounds. “I think my hair is falling out,” she told me. “Why is my hair falling out?”
Later that night, I realized I hadn’t read a book since school had started; I used to
read one a night. My life had reconfigured itself into a tight orbit around my friend’s
rapidly deteriorating mental health.
And yet, strangely, this obsession was destructive for both of us. As she fell apart, so did our friendship. Despite the horrors she must have been experiencing, I ceased to be a nurturing and supportive friend. I refused to touch her. The fragile and breakable about her was repulsive to me. I would look at her and see death where I used to see our shared childhoods; bones where there used to be beauty. Excuses became my dialogue, both to her and about her. When she called, I would not answer, but perversely, I would do little in my free time other than wait for her to call me.
Luckily for the both of us, a brigade of teachers armed with boxes of Kleenex and maternal instinct took command. “Read Man’s Search for Meaning,” my psychology teacher
recommended. “You write about this,” my English teacher commanded. My biggest
revelation came to me during math class, when after opening my book I was confronted
with a very relevant word problem:

1a. Calculate the compensation vectors of fish swimming in a sideways current.

I knew then how to escape the current. I had to calculate the extent that isolation,
for me, was self-made. I had to compute the distance necessary to separate myself from
my friend’s hands pulling at me beneath the water. I, not anyone else, was responsible for finding new meaning in my life. Viktor Frankl’s words had especial meaning for me: “Everything can be taken from a man but… the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” I began to recover, to detach. At lunch, I no longer chose to sit in silence with her, but found laughter with other friends. I began to read again, but with a hunger I had not previously experienced.
This year, she is not fully recovered. I am.
And I wonder still if the decision I made was the only one to make. Occasionally options only make themselves known in hindsight, when the glare of uncertainty has faded. Now, as I look back, I wonder if my recovery had to be at the expense of hers; I wonder if I could have been better to her; I wonder if I was obligated to do something differently. I feel shame at my behavior, shame that the word 'selfishness' applies so fully to my actions.
But I understand now that each person must find his own way to struggle against the
current; that no one is responsible for my happiness but me; and that although depressions are dangerous waters, they are also escapable.

for each seed she swallowed

Persephone remained trapped in hell for

a month.

a Greek allegory for pregnancy scares?

the lost part of the myth:

Persephone's dad chases after Hades

with a rifle and a hunting permit

cause that pimply fuckin'

jerk knocked up his daughter

and didn't even take her out

to dinner first.

chain restaurants in colorado springs

Ben: Why do they call it a Cracker Barrel?
Me: Because it's full of white people.

after the dogs get out

a lamppost flickers uncertainly
like shaky hands
in the dark

passing cars mistake
my hips for the drag of
a dog in heat
headlights
lustful and insistent

"you wanna ride?
get in the car
get in the car"

I keep my back bent into a
middle finger,

throw my head back
and howl
with laughter

these teeth are sharp enough
to cut throats

overheard conversation #1

no, I

didn't cross

the border, ese,

the border

crossed

me.

some nights

at the word

'sadness'

insects crawl across my arms